Re: Standard Packages

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <C32C0CFC70656CBF.9085D7CE760A6E5B.04457989B66A537F@lp.airnews.net>,
Jason King says...
>
>The only issue I have is that I don't have a good reference for the
>standard packages in the ada hierarchy.

The best I can give is the online LRM at
http://www.ada-auth.org/~acats/arm-html/RM-TOC.html . The Standard Libraries are
in section A. 

>Maybe I'm dense, but the arm seems kind of obtuse to me.

It can be a bit slow going. The best way to read the libraries is to read the
package specification first, then read the text underneath. Text_IO is sort of a
special case, in that there's a lot of extra verbage in the LRM about it. That's
probably what got you confused.

>My immediate problem is how to read/write binary files.
>I've found text_io but that doesn't look like quite what I want.

For non-text files, you'll want to use either Sequential_IO, Direct_IO, or
Streams.Stream_IO. Which you need depends on their contents, and how you want to
use them. 

Stream_IO is good for relatively unstructured data, or for when you want to read
in whole arrays of data at once. Sequential_IO is good for reading from a file
that consists of either a predefined record, or a series of them that you'd like
to read one after the other. Direct_IO is good for situations where you'd like
to use Sequential_IO, but you need to move the file pointer around manually.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com